Month: January 2019

We had a great weekend. I knit. I sewed. I even left the house and hung out with a friend (one of my goals this year: to say yes to invitations). Yesterday Miss Oonagh woke up sick so I got a lot of snuggles. Plus we had book club on Friday which means I am DONE with Us Conductors and never have to read the book again. (Why no, I did not enjoy it, thank you for asking.) Today Oonagh and I are home and I’m taking a break from snuggles to write. Also, what I have dubbed as my “cancer period” has finally started so I am basically hemorrhaging right now and can’t leave the house anyway. (Really looking forward to a nap!)

This weekend I also thought a lot about how important it is to empower your children.

On Friday Fionnuala made cupcakes. Saturday morning she made pumpkin pancakes and then planned out lunch for Sunday – which she also made: Oh She Glow’s Mac and Peas (It was delicious).

She’s eight.

Of course, I had to help her but I tried to step back as much as possible and just be near enough to answer questions. During the course of the weekend she learned to double a recipe, peel potatoes and get over her fear of knives. I was nervous about her being around the stove but tried not to freak her out by showing my nervousness. I didn’t always do a great job because at one point she told me I had to leave the kitchen. (Small child! Hot stove!)

Fionnuala, age six, cooking at the stove.

Years ago we tried to have a schedule where the kids helped out in the kitchen one night a week – but we aren’t that great with those kind of schedules in this house. Of course we have a rotating chore chart so they always have chores to do (and no, they don’t get paid for them – just like we don’t get paid for them) but the cooking thing never worked out and they were young. I find it works better for us if someone decides they want to spend time in the kitchen – like Fionnuala did this weekend. Initially it seems like a lot more work for me but it really wasn’t – I mean, one of us would have been in the kitchen cooking anyway because everyone still needs to eat. But my initial reaction when confronted with a child who wants to take over in the kitchen is “ugh” because that involves a lot of patience and guidance on my part for something I could just do myself.

My initial reaction to a lot of things is “ugh” but thing almost always work out well – I just need to get out of the way of myself.

From day one my parenting philosophy has been to raise people I can stand being around as adults. (The fact that I most likely won’t be around when they are adults isn’t lost on me but the goal hasn’t changed.) When I was first diagnosed we also knew that the girls had to become more independent because I just couldn’t be relied upon to do every little thing for them anymore and their dad still has to put in a full day at work. Unless I’m making porridge they all get their own breakfast in the morning. They can make themselves snacks (smoothies are popular). They have to make sure they are organized and ready for school because if they forget to bring a snack to school or their homework I’m not bringing it for them even if the school is across the street. This frees up a lot of my time and brain space – which I appreciate.

Also, I know so many people who reached adulthood and didn’t know how to cook (or do laundry, or clean a kitchen) and I just can’t imagine. I love cooking because I love eating. And while our whole foods, plant-based diet might seem strict or limiting to some it has felt like one big culinary adventure for me.

I will admit, however, that it is kind of nice being kicked out of the kitchen once in a while. Giving up control is hard but I am getting so much more back in return – and so are the girls.

Image is from a walk we took in the fall. “Mum, take a picture of me in this tree! Now take a picture of me in this tree! Oh wait, this one too.”

Yesterday there was an impromptu meeting of the Cancer Club – which isn’t really a club and only has two members in it: myself and my friend with multiple myeloma. Our daughters dubbed it “the cancer club” because we try to get together for our bone juice (bisphosphonate infusion) appointments every three months. But this month she couldn’t come because her cancer took an aggressive turn for the worse – thankfully it has turned back but her story isn’t really mine to tell.

What I do want to talk about is the discussion we had which seemed so normal to us but upon reflection might seem weird to others.

Here is the thing about Stage IV cancer – you can be ticking along stable for months and then gone two weeks later. That is always in the fore front of our minds. It has happened time and again to women I know with metastatic breast cancer. It isn’t always like this of course, sometimes it is a long drawn out process. Sometimes it isn’t. None of us ever know how long we are going to get top-side but some of us know we aren’t going to get as long as we would like.

Anyway, this friend had a book to recommend about raising teenage girls. She and her husband are reading it and as there is the very real possibility that he will be left alone some day raising teenage girls (their girls are already teenagers) she thought, especially after the recent health scare, that it was a good idea they read it together. And she thinks it is a good idea that Mister and I read it together because there is a very real possibility he will be left alone raising teenage girls. These are the things you talk about in the cancer club. You don’t always cry about them either – often you laugh (at least we do) because what else can you do? Do we want to leave our husbands – who are also our partners and our very best friends – to raise our children alone. Not at all. But this is our reality and the longer you live with it the more you come to accept it. Cancer club discussions also include showing off your recent war wounds, discussing what you want for your funeral and what you definitely don’t want, and telling your friend that it is okay she hasn’t organized 10 years of family photos because it will give her family something to do when she is gone. (I’m the friend in that scenario and I appreciated this advice SO MUCH but I will probably still stress about those photos.)

We also talked about making plans. Because you can never stop making plans – and I didn’t realize how hopeful this action was until I was giving my dad the break down of our summer plans the other day. Because I am a PLANNER our summer holiday is booked, the AirBnB is booked, the summer camps are booked and all that is left to do is live our lives until it is time to leave and hope that cancer doesn’t throw any road blocks in our way. But back to my dad. We were on the phone and he needed the itinerary (I am his daughter through-and-through) and he said, “you’re making plans – that is so great” and he sounded so happy for me and it wasn’t until that moment that I realized how important making plans was – not just for myself but for every one around me. It gives us all hope and, as a mom with cancer, I feel like that is a big part of my job. (A job made much easier when one is feeling well I should add – when you are constantly battling sickness things tend to get a lot darker.)

Our plan for the summer is to take the girls out of school a little early and go on a road trip to the coast – and then come home and enjoy our city. My friend’s plan is to take the family to visit family in Europe. Let’s hope we both make it.

My little treehugger turns 6 in a week. That’s a whole other post but I couldn’t resist sharing these photos.

I have taken that title directly from Kerry Clare’s post on her blog: Pickle Me This. If you haven’t read her post I strongly encourage you to go click the above links and read it. But even if you don’t it’s okay, I will be quoting heavily from it.

“I blog to make sense of the world,” is the way that I’ve always explained my attraction to blogging, the way that I use my blog as a workbook, a scrapbook, part of a process toward understanding. But in the last couple of years, the world hasn’t made very much sense at all, and in ways great and small, I’d started to suppose that blogging was futile. Certainly people weren’t reading blogs anymore, and enticing readers to do so required wading into the mires of social media, where standards of behaviour were abysmally low and one gets the sense that with every scroll, the world becomes a place that’s slightly worse.

I think the decline in genuine personal blogs in the past few years is a real tragedy. There are so many – too many – ways for people to (over)share their lives on the internet these days that the world of social media seems filled with a whole lot of noise. Back in “the day” people wrote blogs because they had something personal to say, because they were processing something, because after years of writing in a diary it was nice to have someone to share these thoughts with. Then the monetization of blogs got a hold of the movement. Then Facebook. Then Twitter. Now Instagram (and I’m sure there are others but I’ve stopped at Instagram – a platform I both love and hate depending on my mood and the time of the day). Some of my closest internet friends I met through the blogging community almost 20 years ago (TWENTY YEARS Jen! *insert old ladies of the internet joke here*)

I noticed the shift almost 10 years ago I was contacted by a marketing company asking me to cover the opening of a new shoe store. They were looking for Calgary’s hippest bloggers (their words). I asked them if I they had actually read my blog. Moira was a baby and I was struggling with this new identity of motherhood and the lack of sleep that accompanies all newborns but in particular ones who are born TEETHING (oh, hindsight). Anyway. I directed this company to some actual hip, young, pretty local bloggers but they kept at me until I went to the store (not the opening – that was in the evening and I was on a very tight night anxiety schedule at the time) and talked to the people and picked out a pair of ridiculously expensive boots that they gave me for free. And then I didn’t write a blog post about it because I honestly had nothing to say about a shoe store – even a decent one. I still feel guilty about it and have never agreed to do anything like that ever again – because if you think I felt overwhelmed then then imagine how I am feeling these days with the constant SELL SELL SELL of the internet.

The boots are gorgeous by the way, and I still wear them on occasion .That teething baby will probably be wearing them soon.

Over the years I’ve tried to figure out what kind of blogger I am. Even though I wrote about motherhood in those early days of motherhood I never wanted to be labelled as a mommy blogger. I devoured craft blogs but I could never commit to something like that either. I tried to be a book blogger but I hate writing book reviews and am quite terrible at it. I tried to be a food blogger but the market was already saturated then with new vegans creating recipes and, to be honest, I feel like an idiot every time I pull out my phone and take a photo of my food in public (and at home). Even now I don’t think of myself as a “cancer blogger” although I do use this space on occasion to work through what I am going through on that front.

And I think that is what the best blogging is really about. As Kerry says in her opening sentence, “I blog to make sense of the world.” I find this is still true for me. I blog to make sense of my world – and by not blogging I haven’t given myself the opportunity to organize my thoughts and see where they lead. I too am affected by the shortened attention spans our phones have created. I too am affected by collecting “likes” on posts and scrolling by the lives of other people while not living my own in the “authentic” (barf) way I want to.

It has been over six months since I’ve last posted on this blog. My last post was a goodbye. We packed two backpacks and took three girls on a month long holiday to Ireland. I posted about it on Instagram but for the most part those memories are starting to fade. Also, those snippets on Instagram were never the whole picture – the travel fatigue, the stress of organizing our family from one stop to another. The stress of the Mister navigating the totally whack Irish roads with a wife who really wasn’t feeling great for most of it because she had large cancerous tumours making her uncomfortable with every movement. There are members of my family that now refuse to get back on an airplane.

Things happen and I think about writing about them, but then I feel guilty for not writing and that guilt keeps me away. It’s the same thing with the other writing I’m trying to do. Because I haven’t been able to label myself as a blogger in the new world of blogs I’ve felt like a fraud. But what are labels anyway? Usually something to throw off. Maybe I’m not any kind of blogger which makes me every kind of blogger. A blogger’s blogger if you will. And I think it is great if you can figure out a way to make a living writing for your blog but I’ve never been able to do that, I’ve never had enough of a following or a loud enough voice for people to hear me. But I’m still here and I’m still writing and with Kerry as an inspiration I’m going to do what I have done every day since I’ve been diagnosed with cancer: get up and try and try again. Get sick. Stop. Fail. Get up and try and try again. Succeed. Get sick. Etc. It’s the only life I know right now. With all the noise out there I think blogs that focus on the words and not the flat lay or the aesthetics are needed more than ever.

What if we stopped spending our time on websites owned by multi-million-dollar corporations that are demonstrably making the world worse all the time? What if the forty-five minutes I spent this evening having my brain turned to jelly trying to fathom the perspective of some guy on Twitter cheering on a right wing politician had been spent on anything else? What would life online be without the bots and the manufactured outrage, stupid algorithms, the trolls and the racist uncles? Totally meme-free, with unlimited characters, and nobody’s sharing any fake news article created by a shady network in Outer Siberia. It would be a blog, of course. Right back where we started in Web 2.0, with stories and voices in a range that the world has never before been able to read, voices not in chorus, but not so polarized either. Connected, but not in a thread, more like a quilt, if we’re thinking in textiles. Niche onto niche, something for everyone. With room enough for stories, and questions, and nuance, and reflection, and changing your mind. And also for changing the world, in the small and subtle ways that blogs have always mattered—turns out I’m not ready to give up on that one just yet.

Welcome

I think of this as my little online space to write about things that are important to me. These days a lot of my writing has to do with trying to raise three young daughters while dealing with a terminal cancer diagnosis I received in December 2015. I have no life advice to give and chances are if my home looks clean in a photo it is because I pushed everything out of the frame of the camera.